When I was young my dad would shout, “Turn that noise down.” Now I’m older, my kids yell, “Turn that noise off.” Little do they realize that it’s not noise but music, noise being in the ear of the listener. Whether it is Noise is another matter…

Charlie Charlie is a duo (members unknown) who record for the Melbourne-based Antboy label run by Will Guthrie. Using “walkmans, speakers, Dictaphones, radio, objects, microphones, and cheap concrete sound”, they have produced a studio composition of just under 14 minutes of music; it is released on one of those highly desirable three-inch CDs that so often signify that the music within will be experimental and edgy—here, rightly so. Snatches of radio voices (in various languages) are interspersed with and punctuated by static, sounds and percussion effects from an unfathomable range of sources.

Indeed, from the list quoted above it is intriguing to try to determine what exactly some of the sources are. Suffice to say that they are put together in a way that fully justifies the term “studio composition”; editing it together sounds like it must have been a labor of love (and/or a nightmare) so rapid-fire are some of the transitions. The composition does not have particular highs or lows; it runs it course and then stops. But it is the type of piece that makes you hear the world in a different way afterwards, breaking down those music/sound/noise frontiers and making you aware of the richness and variety of sound that we are all surrounded by. (John Cage would doubtless have been in favor of it.)

I suspect that this is not a CD that many of us would seek to play regularly, but it stands up well to repeated listening… and the world would be a much sadder, poorer place if stuff like this didn’t exist!